Why Guled Mire irritates me

I see Guled Mire was back in the media last week, complaining again about what a racist place New Zealand is.

It’s a recurring theme from Mire, but this time he came up with a slightly different slant. Invited to speak at a forum on Wellington’s future, the Somalian refugee and Black Lives Matter activist suggested Wellington was missing out economically by not tapping into the potential of its migrant communities.

That might be a valid argument as far as it goes, if it’s true. But Mire typically took it a step further by implying that this was due to racism.

He recalled moving from Auckland to Wellington and how he “struggled for the longest time to feel that this was home”. Wellington, he said, felt like a “very white city”.

“I just would walk around and I’d be like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve never felt so black in my life before.” Apparently we’re supposed to accept his personal feeling of alienation as proof that Wellington is a racist city.

Mire went on to talk about the economic case for addressing racism, apparently without offering any evidence (other than feeling black in a predominantly white city) that immigrants were somehow being prevented from contributing economically.

To reinforce his point, he tweeted a picture of himself with some of the other speakers at the forum with the caption: “As always just adding some much-needed colour to the room.” Witty, or snide? You be the judge, but he doesn't strike me as the jokey type.

I’ll be honest about my feelings toward Mire. He irritates me intensely. Even more irritating is the fact that the media obligingly provide a platform for his tiresome discourses.

Mire has been a regular fixture in the news since the March 15 massacres. His comments in the aftermath of that event, when he claimed New Zealand was in denial of the racist hatred that supposedly exists here, was conspicuously at odds with the conciliatory tone struck by members of the Christchurch Muslim community.

He sounded a similarly discordant note three months ago when the mosques shooter (who, it bears repeating, was not a New Zealander and as far as we know, acted alone) was sentenced. On that occasion we saw Muslims and Pakeha police embracing outside the court. The TV news showed a member of the Muslim community kissing a New Zealand flag. We heard praise from Muslim leaders for the comments made by the New Zealand judge who put the murderer away for life, and we again saw ordinary New Zealanders placing flowers at the scenes of the killings.

But when Mire was invited onto Morning Report the day after the sentencing, he preferred (with plenty of encouragement from interviewer Susie Ferguson) to talk about the racism and white supremacy that he claimed was being swept under the carpet.

This is the country that gave Mire and his family – a mother and eight siblings, refugees from a violent, oppressive, corrupt society – a fresh start (and in his case, enabled him to go to university and win a Fulbright award). You’d think that might count for something, but all he can talk about is how racist we are. Mire is the person who’s invited to dinner and spends the evening complaining about the food and criticising the furniture.

His is not the language of acceptance and inclusiveness. It is the language of divisiveness and polarisation. Far from fostering harmony, Mire’s rhetoric emphasises and exacerbates points of difference – and the danger is that in the warped minds of the tiny, subterranean right-wing extremist fringe that very likely does exist in New Zealand, it will be taken as an invitation to crank up the race war.

I welcome cultural diversity and I welcome Muslim immigration. We are all immigrants here, Maori included, and it would be wrong if those of us who benefit from being New Zealanders were to deny that same opportunity to others – though always with the important proviso that immigration must be carefully managed so as not to destabilise the host society, as has happened with disastrous consequences in Europe.

That said, I object when, having taken advantage of the freedom and opportunity this country offers, people such as Mire use their right of free speech – a right not available in the countries they came from – to bad-mouth the place that gave them sanctuary.

I object too to the politicisation of religion. We no longer tolerate the Catholic Church exercising political influence as it once did. And when Don Brash, then leader of the National Party, held secret meetings with members of the Exclusive Brethren who wanted to promote a clandestine campaign against Labour, he was rightly excoriated.

The same rules should apply to Islam. Muslims must be free to practise their faith without discrimination or harassment, but this is still a secular society. It’s possible to deplore the despicable bigotry and racial hatred that resulted in the mosques massacres while simultaneously objecting to attempts by Muslim activists to exploit that atrocity for political leverage, as Mire and the Islamic Women’s Council seek to do.

It would be pointless to deny racism exists in New Zealand; you don’t need to be a “person of colour” (to use the fashionable phrase) to realise that. But that doesn’t make this a racist country. This is a crucial distinction that the activists and promoters of identity politics prefer to ignore.

People emigrate because they see something of worth in the country they’re moving to – typically, something not available to them in the place of their birth, such as freedom, prosperity and opportunity. This is true of virtually everyone who has settled here, right back to the Polynesian voyagers who first discovered the place.

But there’s never any acknowledgement from Mire that New Zealand has been good for him, and rarely any concession that New Zealand’s race relations are anything less than shameful. When there is, as when he briefly acknowledged the aroha that prevailed post March 15, he quickly reverts to his central theme, which is that New Zealand is a racist society.

Moreover, he gives the impression of believing the onus is on New Zealand to reshape itself to meet his particular needs rather than on him to adapt to the society that welcomed him, as immigrants worldwide have done through history.

Note his apparent indignation at Wellington being a “white” city. Well, hello; we’re dealing with the world as it is, not as Mire might prefer it to be. Wellington doesn’t exist for his personal gratification. Adjusting and adapting to a society in which you’re a minority is part of every immigrant’s experience; it’s not a symptom of repression or discrimination.

Yes, Wellington’s a predominantly white city, just as Mogadishu is black. White people would probably feel just as out of place in the Somalian capital as Mire apparently does here (and very likely a lot less safe than Mire when he strolls down Lambton Quay). If he went to Guangdong, he’d probably feel just as conspicuous there. I guess that means China’s a racist country too.

By a striking coincidence, the day after Mire made his comments at that Wellington forum, Stuff published an interview with Mohamed Hassan, an Egyptian-born poet who emigrated to New Zealand with his family when he was eight.

The article quotes Hassan as saying that while the transition from Cairo to Auckland was difficult, moving to New Zealand was the best decision his parents could have made. “We got the opportunity to grow up in this really beautiful, caring country and it’s obviously shaped everything about me.”

Later he talks of his feeling that he has a responsibility to “feed this place the same way it has fed me”. Make of that what you will.

 

We need to talk about Islam

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, November 28.)

New Zealand is overdue for a grown-up conversation about Islam.

It’s a conversation that has been made necessary because as a nation we’re conflicted, to use a popular term, about the religion founded by Mohammad. But the conversation needs to get beyond simplistic, kneejerk allegations of Islamophobia, and it needs to unpick some contradictions and inconsistences in how we view Muslims.

First, some background. There have been Muslims in New Zealand since the late 19^th century. Most of those early arrivals came from South Asia (mainly India) and appear to have lived quietly without attracting public attention.

There was a surge in Muslim immigration during the 1970s and 80s, especially following the nationalist Fiji coup of 1987, which made life very uncomfortable for Fiji Indians of the Muslim faith. Political instability also resulted in the arrival of Muslim immigrants from Somalia and the Middle East.

All of this happened without controversy.  So what changed?

With the rise of Al Qaeda and the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001, a militant form of Islam emerged which was seen as an existential threat to the West. Anxiety about Islamist extremism has since been ratcheted up by repeated terrorist massacres – many of them perpetrated by radicalised Muslim immigrants striking at the countries that took them in – and by appalling atrocities perpetrated by Islamic State and Afghanistan’s Taliban.

Islam, and Muslim immigration, thus became a highly political issue.

All this coincided with substantially increased Muslim immigration to New Zealand. At the time of the 2001 census, 23,631 New Zealand residents identified as Muslim. By last year, the number had jumped to 61,455.

Muslims still make up only 1.34 per cent of the population, half the number of New Zealand Hindus, but they are highly visible and some are politically active – more so since the Christchurch mosque massacres of March 15.

As the spontaneous public reaction showed, New Zealanders were shocked and appalled by that incident and deplored the perpetrator.

The killer did not represent New Zealanders, most of whom feel nothing but goodwill toward Muslims who come here with the aim of living peaceably and contributing to their community.

That goodwill is plainly reciprocated by the many Muslim New Zealanders who, since March 15, have publicly expressed their appreciation of this country and their feeling of being welcome and accepted here.

But here’s where things get tricky. The events of March 15 have been seized by some people, not all of them Muslim, as an opportunity to promote the idea that Muslims are the victims of hatred and discrimination.

This notion is used in turn to politicise the Islamic faith and lobby for treatment not extended to other religions – for instance, seeking women-only days at public swimming pools so that men can’t see women’s bodies, or the provision of prayer rooms in public spaces.

No reasonable person would challenge Muslims’ right to follow their religion without harassment, but nothing is more likely to provoke resistance than the perception that a religious denomination is being singled out for privileged treatment. New Zealand is a secular society and no exceptions should be made.

We must also reserve the right to criticise those aspects of Islam that sit awkwardly with secular liberalism, just as we’re free to mock Christian beliefs. This is not incompatible with respect for the right of Muslims to follow their faith.

Post-March 15, however, there was an outpouring of misconceived liberal guilt that manifested itself in bizarre ways, such as the furore over the name of the Crusaders rugby team. This fuss conveniently overlooked that Muslims were invaders too, with a long history of bloody conquest that reached far into Europe on one side and India on the other.

Arguably the biggest challenge posed by Islam, though, is to the political Left, which must somehow reconcile its embrace of Islam with its promotion of rights for women and gays. Good luck with that, as they say, because the two are inherently incompatible.

What complicates the issue is that Islam is a broad church, ranging from tolerance and acceptance of difference at one end of the spectrum – i.e. the version of Islam that should be welcomed here – to unspeakable violence and repression at the other.

Why the Left champions Islam is no mystery. It’s because the Islamic world is seen as standing in opposition to the capitalist West, so must be supported.

But by railing against so-called Islamophobia without qualification, the Left lays itself open to the accusation that it turns a blind eye to the repression of women and the stoning of homosexuals. It's an exquisite ideological tangle, and the world waits with interest for the Left to declare exactly where it stands.

Some more thoughts on the Folau furore

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, May 16.)

Something’s not quite right here. The 21^st century buzzwords are diversity and inclusivity, but they seem to be applied very selectively.

It seems we’re in favour of diversity and inclusivity if we’re talking about race, colour, gender and sexual identity, the latter two of which keep spinning off into ever-new permutations. But puzzlingly, we’re only partially tolerant when it comes to religious belief.

We are encouraged to be tolerant toward Islam, especially since the Christchurch massacres, and so we should be. The right to practise one’s religion, at least unless it interferes with the rights of others, is one we should all unquestioningly support.

This applies even when secular society disapproves of some of those religions, or scratches its collective head in bemusement at their practices and beliefs.

But if freedom of religion is one cornerstone of a free society, so is freedom of expression, which includes the right to subject religion, along with every other institution of society, to critical scrutiny and even ridicule.

Virtually all religions – whether we’re talking Catholicism, Mormonism, Judaism, the Destiny Church or the Exclusive Brethren – possess what, to non-believers, are quirks, absurdities, hypocrisies and cruelties that render them ripe for mockery and condemnation.

For decades, comedians and satirists have taken joyous, blasphemous advantage of this freedom. How people laughed, for example, at Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, with its wickedly subversive song Every Sperm is Sacred – a dig at Catholic teaching on birth control.

If it offended devout Catholics – well, tough. Freedom to ridicule is the flipside of freedom to worship.

Mainstream Christianity is still considered fair game by comedians and satirists, and no one bats an eyelid. But somehow, Islam seems to be off-limits. Even a cool, reasoned criticism of Islam is likely to excite accusations of Islamophobia.

The champions of diversity don’t seem to grasp that you can abhor the grotesque atrocities perpetrated by Islamic fanatics while simultaneously defending the right of peaceful, law-abiding Muslims, such as those in Christchurch, to practise their religion.

There’s no contradiction here. It’s only when criticism of religion escalates into incitement to hostility or violence that it becomes unacceptable.

Neither do the defenders of Islam seem to realise that by denouncing all criticism of Islam as Islamophobic, they give the impression of condoning a religion that, in its extreme forms, thinks it’s okay to stone homosexuals, apostates and adulterers to death.

All of which leads us neatly to Israel Folau, who condemned atheists, drunks, homosexuals and fornicators with equal vehemence, but seems to have been pilloried solely for his statement that gays will go to Hell.

The first point to be made about the Folau hysteria is that it was avoidable by the simple expedient of ignoring him. The people who have so energetically helped to spread Folau’s message are those who insist he should have kept his supposedly hateful opinions to himself.

I’ve been searching for the logic there, but so far it eludes me.

Equally perplexing is that while Folau’s detractors would scoff at the very idea that such a place as Hell exists, they apparently took his Instagram post seriously enough to whip themselves into a frenzy of outrage.

They could have smiled indulgently and let Folau’s post go unremarked, but that would have been too hard for the social media trolls who swarm around in cyberspace looking for things to get furious about.  It would also have meant passing up a chance to mount an attack on conservative Christianity, when obviously the opportunity was just too good to ignore.

So much for diversity and inclusivity, then. The attacks on Folau by people who profess to embrace difference are as fine a combination of sanctimony and vindictiveness as you’re ever likely to see. And it goes beyond mere criticism, because the purpose is to punish him.

If we truly believed in diversity and inclusiveness, we would accept Folau as part of humanity’s rich and varied tapestry, even if we don’t agree with him. Media bores like Peter FitzSimons, who has built a career out of being the Wallaby hard man who was really, all along, a sensitive liberal, would have to find something else to moralise about.

We would also acknowledge that Folau wasn’t trying to incite hatred against anyone. He was acting according to his Christian conscience, which calls him to save sinners.What’s more, his views are shared by many Pasifika people, and not long ago would have been considered unremarkable in mainstream society.

They are taken, after all, from the New Testament, which forms the basis for much of Western civilisation's moral and judicial framework. Perhaps that's the real target here, and the Folau furore just an appetiser.

So now we know: we're a nation of racists and Islamophobes

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., March 21.)

You may have thought, as I did, that the Christchurch shootings were the act of a lone-wolf fanatic.

You may have thought, as I did, that no one saw it coming,

You may have thought, as I did, that New Zealand reacted with a genuine and overwhelming outpouring of shock, grief and anguish.

You may have thought that thousands showed their solidarity with Christchurch Muslims by attending public vigils, spontaneously setting up tribute sites and donating millions to a Givealittle appeal.

You may have thought that the Christchurch Muslim community, which could have been forgiven for withdrawing into itself, responded to the calamity with a remarkable spirit of openness, inclusivity and forgiveness.

You may have thought that our own shock was mirrored by that of the outside world, which was aghast that such terrible things could happen in a country viewed internationally as peaceful, tolerant and respectful toward minority groups.

Well, it seems we all got it wrong. Because in the days following the shootings, an alternative narrative emerged.

According to this alternative narrative, we are a hateful nation of racists, white supremacists and Islamophobes.

Not only that, but the massacre was no surprise. A sudden outburst of violent race hatred was bound to happen. Rather like the cataclysmic earthquake we are constantly warned to be prepared for, it was not a question of if, but when.

It was, we were told, the inevitable outcome of a society which condones hate speech.

The former narrative, the one most of us never thought to challenge, was the dominant one in the mainstream media, but the alternative version – let’s call it the “We told you so” version - gained a lot of traction on the online comment platforms favoured by the commentariat.

It’s a narrative of self-loathing that wants us to think the worst of ourselves. It’s a narrative that shamelessly seeks to politicise the killings and create a moral panic in the hope not only that we’ll tighten the gun ownership laws – no arguments there – but far more ominously, that we might be persuaded to discard such democratic niceties as freedom of speech.

We were told, for example, that Islamophobia is “deeply embedded in our society”. That comment came from former Green MP and lifelong sanctimonious far-Left finger-wagger Keith Locke, who quoted former Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy as saying that every Muslim woman she knew had faced racist abuse.

We were told that Muslims in New Zealand wouldn’t be safe until we had tough new laws governing “hate speech”, however that might be defined. We were urged to dispense with old-fashioned democratic notions of free speech and balanced debates.

According to this argument, some views are so self-obviously correct that no one should be allowed to challenge them and others are so self-obviously contemptible that they must be prohibited.  It worries me deeply that I frequently hear this line even from journalists, who should be the first to defend the barricades when freedom of speech is at risk.

We were told too that the Islamic Women’s Council had been trying for years to alert the government to the existence of extreme racists and Islamophobes in New Zealand.

But I found it hard to reconcile that statement with the interview I heard on the BBC with a Muslim woman from Christchurch who said she and her family came to New Zealand because it was safe. She told BBC correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes she had never felt threatened here.

This leaves me wondering exactly who the Islamic Women’s Council represents and what its agenda might be. None of the Muslims I saw and heard being interviewed in the painful days following the shootings expressed even a faint hint of recrimination. None blamed their adopted country or mentioned Islamophobia.

On the contrary, they gave the impression of cherishing their lives here and seemed as perplexed as the rest of us by the violence – which, we need to keep reminding ourselves, was perpetrated by a non-New Zealander.

Obviously, people like Keith Locke weren’t listening. Or perhaps they ignore anything that doesn’t align with their preferred narrative of a divided, oppressive society.

Yes, it’s deplorable that Muslim women are sometimes abused. But who should we allow to serve as the model that dictates the agenda: a few misanthropic cranks who haven’t yet got their heads around the new multicultural New Zealand, or the countless thousands of New Zealanders who attended vigils, donated money or quietly grieved at home for fellow citizens who happen to be Muslim?

Call me a Pollyanna, but the latter group says a lot more to me about the sort of society New Zealand is than isolated instances of abuse in shopping malls.

Male power and control - the factor common to virtually all organised religions

(First published in Stuff regional papers and on Stuff.co.nz., October 17.)

Power and control. In the final analysis, that’s what most organised religion comes down to.

To those three words you can add two more: power and control by men. This is the defining characteristic of virtually all hierarchical religions. 

It's strikingly at odds with a society in which women have rightly demanded, and often obtained, equality in other spheres. But it has ever been thus. You don’t need a PhD in religious studies to understand that organised religion depends heavily on the ability of a small, male elite – a priesthood, in other words – to exercise control over its followers.

I have been more than usually aware of this in recent weeks, partly because of a couple of challenging films.

In the 2017 drama Disobedience, two women from an Orthodox Jewish community in London risk ostracism by rekindling an illicit relationship. It’s a film whose claustrophobic settings powerfully convey the stifling atmosphere of an insular society in which the rules are dictated by men for the benefit of men.

Even more unsettling, because it’s factual, is the Netflix documentary One of Us, which follows three people who face isolation and harassment after leaving an oppressive Hasidic Jewish community in New York.

By coincidence, I recently interviewed a man named Imtiaz Shams, co-founder of Faith to Faithless, a British-based organisation that supports people trying to break free from repressive religions.

Shams himself was raised as a Muslim, but Faith to Faithless welcomes defectors from all faiths. In Britain, former Jehovah’s Witnesses and Orthodox Jews as well as ex-Muslims have turned to it for help.

Many keep their apostasy secret out of fear, because “coming out” as non-believers often has serious consequences, not the least of which is estrangement from their families. The male leaders of these religions understand only too well the power of family ties, and how they can be exploited to deter prospective dissenters.

In One of Us, a Jewish mother is tormented by the prospect of being cut off from her children because she has exercised her right to leave the faith. In New Zealand, the Exclusive Brethren sect and the Gloriavale religious community follow a similar practice of shunning anyone who leaves.

This is a particularly cruel and effective tool of control. When someone has been immersed since birth in a tightly knit community that deliberately isolates itself from wider society, it takes an act of massive courage – or desperation – to walk away and start afresh in an unfamiliar and intimidating world.

Shams described this experience as like entering a black void. Islam so totally defined his existence that it took him a long time to realise he could leave. And when he finally quit, he thought he must have been first person ever to do it.

Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, the conservative strands of Islam and nominally Christian sects such as Gloriavale and the Exclusive Brethren all operate at the extreme end of the religious control spectrum.

The men who run these religions – and they are always men – impose their will by prescribing elaborate and often arcane rules that govern the way their followers must live their daily lives: the clothes they wear, who they should marry, the way they style their hair, the food they eat (right down to the ingredients and how it’s prepared) and, in the case of sects like Gloriavale, the names they go by.

There is little rationale for these oppressive rules other than that they provide a means of control and domination.

At the other end of the spectrum there are religions which seem to avoid male-dominated hierarchical structures and allow a reasonable amount of room for followers to act according to their conscience. The Baha’i Faith strikes me as one example; Quakers another.

In between these extremes there are Churches that we generally think of as liberal, such as the Church of England. But even here, there has been a marked reluctance by men to relinquish power. In British Anglicanism, the male establishment fought a determined rearguard action against the ordination of women.

Yet the Bible indicates that Jesus Christ respected and valued women. Would he have approved of religions in which women were expected to be subordinate to self-important men with a fondness for dressing in peculiar costumes? I don’t believe so.

As for Catholicism, you can only sigh. On the rare occasions when determined women such as New Zealand’s own Suzanne Aubert have achieved positions of influence in the Catholic Church, it has often been in the face of resistance and disapproval from the male hierarchy.

For now at least, men remain firmly in control of Catholicism. But they have made such a grotesque and scandalous mess of things that you have to wonder how long it will be before the long-suffering Catholic laity, male and female, demand that the whole rotten structure be torn down and rebuilt.

Why on earth would anyone want to replicate the conditions they've just fled from?

(First published in The Dominion Post, January 22.)

Let me see if I can get this straight. Millions of oppressed, dispossessed Muslims have risked their lives fleeing the Middle East and North Africa.

They are mostly victims of Islamic regimes from a part of the world where democracy is virtually unknown (Israel aside). They are escaping sectarianism, persecution, civil war, anarchy, corruption and starvation.

None of them want to go to other Islamic countries. Why would they, when Islam represents all that they’re trying to get away from?

Besides, hardly any Islamic regimes offer them refuge. With the honourable exceptions of Lebanon and Jordan, most Islamic countries – including some that are fabulously wealthy – appear impervious to the suffering of their co-religionists.  

No, the place these Islamic refugees want to be is Europe – Western Europe, to be precise. And what attracts them there? Presumably freedom, for a start.

Western Europe is democratic. People actually elect their governments. The rule of law is enforced not by religious zealots but by courts that apply principles of fairness and impartiality.

In Europe, people’s prospects don’t depend on having been born into the right sex, religious sect or clan. They enjoy civil rights – the right to dress the way they want, to vote, to speak their minds, to have educational opportunities, to drive cars and enter into romantic relationships without fear of being murdered in “honour” killings.

And presumably these refugees are also attracted to capitalism, because more than any other “ism” it gives them the greatest chance to fulfil their human potential.

So, having been drawn to this benevolent part of the world where people enjoy freedom, opportunity and prosperity, what do they do?

A large number of them, it seems, immediately want to replicate the conditions that they’ve just fled from. This is the bit that I just don’t get.

As events in Germany on New Year’s Eve showed, the first impulse of many young Islamic men is to abuse the hospitality extended to them.

Some, of course, go much further than orchestrated sex attacks on young women. They want to murder the infidels who have given them shelter and succour. 

Things just don’t add up here. Why would anyone flee a cruel and repressive society, then seek to undermine the democratic institutions of their host country so that it might become another Muslim theocracy? How perverse is that?

They say Islam isn’t to blame for the barbaric acts carried out in its name, but that’s only partly true.

Yes, many Muslims respect Western institutions and want only to live in peace in the countries that have accepted them. They understand that freedom to practise their religion is one thing; the right to impose it on their host society is quite another. These Muslims are welcome.

But Islam cannot be exonerated of responsibility for the mayhem and slaughter in the Middle East, nor for the creeping contamination of Europe. The tenets of Islam provide a theological framework that enables groups like the Taleban, Al Qaeda and Isis to flourish.

Apologists say that what these groups do is a perversion of Islam, but they are all part of the Islamic tradition. They didn’t spring out of a vacuum.

There are lessons here for New Zealand. Our natural impulse as a humane, liberal society is to take pity on Islamic asylum-seekers and give them refuge. But we can’t ignore what’s happened in Germany, where young Islamic men have repaid their host country’s generosity by abusing its young women.

There is ample evidence that male Islamists can’t handle the sexual freedom of liberal western societies. Their view of females as inferior, an attitude sanctioned by Islamic law, becomes fused with desire for the women they see walking in the streets wearing makeup and revealing clothing.

It’s a poisonous mix: one part old-fashioned lust, one part repressive religious zealotry that teaches them to regard such women as whores who deserve to be punished.

Closer to home, we’ve seen the trouble caused in Australia by young Middle Eastern men with a strong sense of entitlement and an obvious resentment of their adopted country. Large groups of young Muslim men on the loose in Western society almost always spell trouble.

It must surely be only a matter of time before even tolerant, liberal Europeans get provoked to the point where they rise up in retaliation and defence of their own values. So far the resistance is coming mainly from the ugly Far Right, but it may not stay that way.

We in New Zealand, as is so often the case, have the good fortune to be able observe all this from a safe distance and absorb the lessons. But will we?

Wellington's nice, but it's good to point the car back over the Rimmers

(First published in The Dominion Post, August 14.)

TAKING advantage of a friend’s offer of her apartment while she was overseas, my wife and I spent three nights in Wellington last week.

I spent a cumulative 25 years of my life in the capital but when I go there now, having lived in the Wairarapa since 2003, I almost feel like a tourist.

The city is changing, and I don’t just mean the streets and buildings. We wandered along Oriental Parade with our daughter and grandsons on a Sunday afternoon and although it seemed all of Wellington had turned out to enjoy the unseasonably balmy weather, I didn’t see a single familiar face.

That wouldn’t have happened 20, even 10 years ago. Wellington has always felt to me like a big village, but the city’s population is turning over.

At my wife’s suggestion, I took my mountain bike and spent a contented couple of hours re-acquainting myself with the maze of tracks on Mt Victoria. It reminded me what a fantastic asset the city has in the Town Belt.

Years ago I railed against the eco-Nazis who ordered the felling of the mature pines along the spine of Mt Vic above Alexandra Rd; not being native, they had to go. But I’m pleased to report that the natives planted in their place are flourishing and within a few years the worst of the scar should be healed.

The removal of the pines continues. I spent several minutes admiring the coolness and skill of an arborist perched about 15 metres above the ground, his chainsaw suspended from his waist as he supervised the removal of the massive crown of a tree that he had just lopped off.  Working in a tight, confined space, a crane lowered the unwieldy load to the ground as delicately as a nurse might place a newborn baby in the arms of its mother.

We appreciated the benefits of the inner-city lifestyle and the proximity to shops and restaurants. We enjoyed our first-ever meal at the venerable Monsoon Poon – my daughter couldn’t believe we’d never been there before – but were less impressed by another celebrated eatery much favoured by the chattering classes. It was over-rated and over-priced, just as when we last ate there a decade ago. (A friendly waitress though – from Ohio.)

As pleasant as it all was, I was happy, as always, to point the car back over the Rimutaka Hill. There is a steadily growing colony of Wellington refugees in the Wairarapa, of which I’m happy to be one.

* * *

AS ALWAYS, the Olympic Games was a mixture of the uplifting and the irritating.

The buildup was tainted by repugnant bullying on the part of corporate sponsors determined to protect their interests against even the most harmless incursions. Corporate strong-arming, backed by obsequious governments, now seems an inevitable part of all major sporting events. But that unpleasantness was largely forgotten once the Games started.

Our competitors generally distinguished themselves with their grace and dignity, in defeat as well as in victory. We met a charismatic new star in the person of cyclist Simon van Velthooven and were reminded what a gentleman Mark Todd is, although under that laidback exterior he must be ferociously competitive.

Nick Willis and Valerie Adams carried the huge burden of a nation’s hopes, magnified by unrealistic media expectations, and earned our admiration for the way they handled their (and our) disappointment.

Others, including rowers Hamish Bond and Eric Murray, did their best to perpetuate the traditional image of New Zealanders as bashful champions, almost apologetic at having drawn attention to themselves by winning.

No disgrace, then, on the part of the competitors. But the same can’t be said for some of the media coverage, which brought out our least attractive national traits.

New Zealand’s first gold medal was the cue for an avalanche of triumphalism and hyperbole on TVNZ, with laughable references to a “gold rush”. On such occasions the nationalistic chest-thumping of some in the media stands in striking contrast to the modesty of our athletes.

Similarly, the petty (and, as it turned out, premature) gloating over our medal count against that of Australia exposed one of the less desirable traits in the national psyche, laying bare our inferiority complex and touchiness toward our big neighbour.

* * *

THE SO-CALLED war on terror isn’t just being lost in godforsaken Afghanistan. We’ve capitulated closer to home too.

English playwright Richard Bean, interviewed by Kim Hill on Saturday, told how he had been commissioned to write a new version of the classical Greek play Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece withheld sex from their husbands to dissuade them from war.

Bean decided to put an Islamic spin on the drama. In his adaptation, the women of Greece were replaced by the 12 virgins of paradise who reward Islamic martyrs. The theatre company that commissioned his play loved it, but was too terrified of reprisals to stage it.

Mad mullahs 1; freedom of speech 0.

The bad and good of Islam

Kim Hill this morning had an interesting interview with Tim Winter, a.k.a. Shaikh Abdal-Hakim Murad, an erudite and articulate English convert to Islam. I didn’t hear the entire interview but his basic thrust seemed to be that Islam is greatly misunderstood in the West – hardly a new line, but quite persuasive when it’s argued as cogently as it was on this occasion. He said moderate, mainstream Islam is far removed from, and undeservedly tainted by, the extreme, militant political expressions of the faith as epitomised by organisations like Al Qaeda.

Taking the Taleban as an example, Winter likened them to tribal village hillbillies with little grasp – and a very warped grasp at that – of orthodox Islamic teaching. He also made the point that most Muslim immigration to Britain, which has become a wellspring of Islamic extremism, was from illiterate Pashtun villages in the more backward regions of Pakistan, where the version of Islam practised is (I’m paraphrasing here) a primitive local perversion of what credible Muslim scholars teach.

The problem is, as he pointed out, that the version of Islam we are confronted with in the media each day is the militant, extreme one that wants to exterminate all infidels. This has distorted our understanding of Islamic teaching and led to the fearful, anti-Islamic sentiment exemplified by opposition to the proposed Muslim cultural centre in downtown New York (not to mention European proposals to ban minarets, which ironically call into question our commitment to freedom of religion).

Even as I’m writing this I can hear people saying, “Yeah, yeah – we’ve heard all this before from apologists for Islamic extremism”. But at the very least, we have to acknowledge that Islam, like Christianity (Judaism too, for that matter), is not monolithic. Just as Christianity encompasses all manner of good and bad followers, from loony right-wing fundamentalists to neo-Marxists (both bad, in my view – the good Christians are somewhere in between), so the expressions of Islam range from the fanatical oppression of the Taleban and grotesque fringe groups like Somalia’s al Shabaab (reported today as having executed two illiterate teenage girls by firing squad for “spying”) to the civil, conciliatory variant personified by Hill’s guest this morning – and by some of the New Zealand Muslims whose reasoned and moderate letters I occasionally see in the papers.